Calls for Papers | Transformations Journal

Issue 37: Orbiting Otherwise: Alternative Approaches to Satellites. OPEN.

Abstracts (200 – 400 words excluding references) are due 15^th November 2021, with a view to submit articles by 1st March 2022.

Issue 36: Artificial Creativity. CLOSED

Abstracts (400 – 500 words excluding references) are due 5^th February 2021, with a view to submit articles by 31^st May 2021.

Issue 37: Orbiting Otherwise: Alternative Approaches to Satellites.

Since the first experiments with satellite technologies in the 1950s and ‘60s, the use of satellites for telecommunications, global positioning and remote sensing has grown into a vast multinational enterprise. Rooted in military applications, satellite data is now a fact of the everyday, incorporated into GPS and mobile devices, displayed on weather maps and apps, and accessible online in many forms. Through active and passive remote sensing, and radar, lidar and multispectral imaging, satellite data also underpins a very large portion of global climate research today.

But this apparent ease of access and the quotidian nature of satellite data today begs the question of alternative uses and inquiries we can make of and through satellite data and infrastructure. How can creative engagements with satellite technologies critique their function in scientific or military operations? How can art and creative fabrication escape or reconfigure the enframing of the human organon by the all-pervasive seeing-eye of satellite technology? This enormous technical apparatus is a tangible reminder that in the age of the Anthropocene our impact on Earth extends many thousands of kilometres into space; how might humanities and social science scholars respond to the existence of this orbital infrastructure? What new ways of sensing and thinking do satellites provide?

This issue of Transformations invites scholars in the arts, humanities and social sciences to reflect on new ways of understanding and using satellite infrastructure. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

New artistic uses of satellite data
Hacking Google Earth for critical purposes
Use of satellite data by Traditional Owners
Multispectral imaging and its implications
Privacy, secrecy and the “other night sky”
Reconfigurations of space and territory
Transnational, regulatory and cultural contexts
Liveness and immediacy
Space Junk, debris and the Anthropocene in space
Algorithmic governmentality and biopolitics in orbit

>>> Abstracts (200-400 words) are due 15^th November 2021, with a view to submit articles by 1^st March 2022.

>>> Abstracts should be forwarded to: editor@transformationsjournal.org

CFP Issue 36: Artificial Creativity

Guest editors: Dr. Bojana Romic (Malmö University, Sweden) & Dr. Bo Reimer (Malmö University, Sweden)

Special issue of Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture and Technology, in collaboration with Medea Research Lab, Malmö University, Sweden.

This special issue of Transformations entitled Artificial Creativity aims to stir a discussion about the cultural, societal, and ethical aspects of robots or AI engaged in creative production.

Machines engaged in creative activities can be traced back to Pierre Jaquet-Droz’s automata The Writer and Musical Lady (1770s), which involved calligraphic writing and the performing of music respectively. In the 1950s, Jean Tinguely’s Méta-matics produced generative artworks, in response to the long-standing questions about the role of the artist.

Most recently, a number of artworks have featured robots that draw (Robotlab), paint (Moura), or make music (Weinberg). It has been announced that the 10^th Bucharest Biennale in 2022 will be “curated” by Jarvis, an AI system created by Spinnwerks, Vienna (FlashArt).

These tendencies provoke at least two lines of inquiry. On one hand, what are the possibilities and potential pitfalls of AI technologies in the cultural sector? For example, AI makes its recommendations and choices based on its exposure to large databases, and yet worries pertain about the “increasing automation of the aesthetic realm”, that might, over time, reduce cultural diversity (Manovich 85).

On the other hand, AI technologies encourage debate about the meaning and purpose of human creativity (Gunkel 1). The title of this special issue is a playful rendering of the term artificial intelligence, which also serves as a reminder that technological innovations are often ripe with organismic language (Jones; Boden).

The call for papers invites researchers from different areas of expertise, including but not limited to: creative arts research, science and technology studies (STS), critical cultural studies, humanities, human-robot interaction (HRI), ethics of technology, design anthropology, social sciences, gender studies, posthumanism, architecture, game studies, and voice interface design.

We especially encourage submissions rooted in the humanities, with a focus on robots (i.e. embodied AI) invested in creative/artistic labour. We also welcome submissions that critically address the contested terms “artificial intelligence” and “creativity”.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Applied and/or imagined potential of the “artificial creativity”
Automatisation of aesthetics and image culture
Creative robotics and/or AI
Robots and performative arts
Ethical questions regarding authorship in computational art
Human-robot collaboration in the process of cultural production
Investigations into the shared histories of humans and machines in the process of co-creation

>>> Abstracts (400 – 500 words excluding references) are due 5^th February 2021, with a view to submit articles by 31^st May 2021.

>>> Abstracts should be forwarded to: bojana.romic@mau.se

Bibliography

Boden, Margaret. The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms. Routledge, 2004.
Flash Art Feed. “The 10^th Bucharest Biennale: the first biennial curated by Artificial Intelligence in VR.” May 27^th 2020
Gunkel, David. “Special Section: Rethinking Art and Aesthetics in the Age of Creative Machines: Editor’s Introduction.” Philosophy and Technology, vol. 30, no. 3, 2017, pp. 263–265.
Jacquet-Droz, Pierre. The Musical Lady. 1770s, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel.
Jacquet-Droz, Pierre. The Writer. 1770s, Musée d’art et d’histoire de Neuchâtel.
Jones, Raya. “What makes a robot ‘social’?” Social Studies of Science, vol. 47, no. 4, 2017, pp. 556–579.
Manovich, Lev. “Automating Aesthetics.” Flash Art, vol. 50, no. 316, 2017, pp. 85-87
Moura, Leonel. Swarm Painting 08. 2002, Courtesy of Robotarium, Alverca / Sao Pãulo.
Robotlab. The Big Picture. 2014, Courtesy of Robotlab. ZKM, Karlsruhe.
Weinberg, Gill. “Shimon: Now a Singing, Songwriting Robot: Marimba-Playing Robot Composes Lyrics and Melodies with Human Collaborators.” 25 Feb. 2020, www.news.gatech.edu/2020/02/25/shimon-now-singing-songwriting-robot.